role in the Provisional IRA. Sands and Joe McDonnell planned the bombing of the Balmoral Furniture Company in Dunmurry on 14 October 1976. The showroom was destroyed but as the IRA men left the scene there was a gun battle with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Leaving behind two wounded, Seamus Martin and Gabriel Corbett, the remaining four (Sands, McDonnell, Seamus Finucane, and Sean Lavery) tried to escape by car, but were arrested. One of the revolvers used in the attack was found in the car. On 7 September 1977, the four men were sentenced to 14 years for possession of the revolver. They were not charged with explosive offences. Immediately after his sentencing, Sands was implicated in a fight and sent to the punishment block in Crumlin Road Prison. The cells contained a bed, a mattress, a chamber pot and a water container. Books, radios and other personal items were not permitted, although a Bible and some Catholic pamphlets were provided. Sands refused to wear a prison uniform, so was kept naked in his cell for twenty-two days without access to bedding from 7.30 am to 8.30 pm each day. Maze Prison years In late 1980, Sands was chosen Officer Commanding of the Provisional IRA prisoners in the Maze Prison, succeeding Brendan Hughes, who was participating in the first hunger strike. Republican prisoners organised a series of protests seeking to regain their previous Special Category Status, which would free them from some ordinary prison regulations. This began with the "blanket protest" in 1976, in which the prisoners refused to wear prison uniforms and wore blankets instead. In 1978, after a number of attacks on prisoners leaving their cells to "slop out" (i.e., empty their chamber pots), this escalated into the "dirty protest", wherein prisoners refused to wash and smeared the walls of their cells with excrement. Sands wrote about the brutality of Maze prison guards: "The screws [prison guards] removed me from my cell naked and I was conveyed to the punishment block in a blacked out van. As I stepped out of the van on arrival there they grabbed me from all sides and began punching and kicking me to the ground ... they dragged me by the hair across a stretch of hard core rubble to the gate of the punishment block. The full weight of my body recoiled forward again, smashing my head against the corrugated iron